The Onion is catching many stories that other news outlets are missing. For instance, consider this story regarding verses of the Star Spangled Banner that, until recently, were lost:
Restoration Of 'Star Spangled Banner' Uncovers Horrifying New Verses
The Onion reports:
"By killing off the No. 1 threat to the environment, new Marlboro Earths will have a long-term effect on the overall health of our planet," Philip Morris spokesperson Janet Weiss said. "If everyone in America does their part and joins our new green-smoking movement, then together we can eradicate man's destructive practices once and for all."
Noam Chomsky doesn't put any value in polished oratory skills, a point he made clear in an interview he gave Nigel Farndale at Telegraph.co.uk:
I am no Barack Obama,’ he says to me now. ‘I don’t have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had. I don’t like to listen to it. Even people I admire, like Martin Luther King, just turn me off. I don’t think it is the way to reach people. If you are giving a graduate course you don’t try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.’What does Chomsky think of Obama?
I take it he didn’t buy into Obama’s message of hope and change. ‘Elections in the United States are expensive extravaganzas run by the public relations industry. The PR people looked at the polls and picked slogans accordingly. ‘Did you know Obama won the best campaign of the advertising industry in 2008? It was politicians being marketed as a product, like toothpaste. What does that have to do with democracy? If you read his statement you find yourself asking what was the hope? What was the change? These were empty words.’
At The New Republic, James K. Galbraith argues that "The financial crisis in America isn't over. It's ongoing, it remains unresolved, and it stands in the way of full economic recovery."
To restore the rule of law means first a rigorous audit of the banks and of the Federal Reserve. This means investigations—Representative Marcy Kaptur has proposed adding a thousand FBI agents to this task. It means criminal referrals from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, from the regulators, from Congress, and from the new management of troubled banks as they clean house. It means indictments, prosecutions, convictions, and imprisonments. The model must be the clean-up of the Savings and Loans, less than 20 years ago, when a thousand industry insiders went to prison. Bankers must be made to feel the power of the law in their bones.I agree with much of what Galbraith says, although he wants to give the ratings agencies a free pass, which is, in my view, outrageous. If the ratings agencies had bothered to inspect even a few loan files, they would have seen the exploding ARMs triggered by 2 or 3 year teaser rates and the scant or non-existent documentation. A huge percentage of subprime loans were guaranteed to fail. It add insult to injury that the ratings agencies are successfully (so far) invoking the First Amendment to defend their incompetence and fraud.
Check out what it takes to play Starcraft at a professional level: Here is further explanation.